Whop acquires Hidden Studios to build its ads division
What's the deal? Whop, the digital commerce platform, has acquired Hidden StudiosDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, an in-game advertising company that reaches tens of millions of players per month through Fortnite minigames. Hidden Studios will power Whop's new ads division.
The acquisition brings a full-circle moment for Hidden Studios founder Nicholas Motamedi, who was one of Whop's earliest sellers. He first used the platform at age 16 to rent out sneaker bots.
Why now? Hidden Studios had grown into one of the largest studios on the Fortnite platform, with 15–20 million monthly active users — the kind of scale that makes an in-game ads business viable. For Whop, the deal lets it expand beyond digital commerce into advertising, a lucrative adjacent market.
Motamedi's path to this point was anything but linear. He started reselling sneakers at 15, pivoted to flipping bots — at one point moving $20,000 to $30,000 a day in trades — then built CryptoClub, a paid community that generated around $150,000 a month at its peak. The 2023 bear market wiped it out.
He then spent two and a half years building Hidden Studios from scratch, grinding through a full year with no revenue before gaining traction.
What could go wrong? The acquisition hinges on the durability of in-game advertising within Fortnite's ecosystem. Platform risk is real: Hidden Studios' reach depends on Epic Games continuing to support third-party minigames and ad integrations. Any policy shift could undercut the business overnight.
The signal: Whop, classified as a late-growth digital commerce platform, is absorbing an early-growth in-game advertising studio — a move that mirrors a wider pattern of maturing marketplace platforms building owned media channels to unlock higher-margin revenue. The acquisition also underscores how Fortnite's third-party creative ecosystem has become large enough to produce standalone ad businesses worth acquiring, turning user-generated game modes into genuine media inventory.
Read more: whop.com
